I throw my hands up in the air sometimes
by sapphireswimming
Summary: He counts down the hours until he knows they're safe.


**Ummm so I wrote another thing last night? I honestly don't know where it came from and I apologize in advance.**

 **Rated for death and gore. Yay, angst day.**

 **On a somewhat completely unrelated note, you should all go check out the video Danny Phantom SG-1 made to Dynamite because it's awesome. And might have had something to do with giving me this idea even though it's nothing at all like what this fic turned into.  
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 **I throw my hands up in the air sometimes**

October 1, 2015

(Angst Day)

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Danny counts down the last few weeks in a haze of incomplete college coursework, shirked chores, and frantically jerking upright in bed after yet another nightmare of exploding restaurants, jerky future selves, and timelines that no longer exist.

He knows that he'll never turn into Dan. Ever. He swore it, promised himself and his friends.

But he was making sure that there was never a reason for it to come to that, either.

He, Sam, and Tucker avoid the Nasty Burger for months, just in case a vat of sauce gets too hot from sheer dumb negligence.

None of them even have to say anything. But they all had one eye on the date, waiting for the date of Dan's disappearance to come and go and leave them in the clear.

Danny isn't going to breathe easily until he is sure that nothing happens to mess up anything in this time stream.

It's hard enough looking in the mirror and seeing how chiseled his jaw line is becoming. How muscular ghost fighting has made him. How deep his voice has become over the years. His hair he's kept as short as it has always been. No letting it grow out, and always getting it trimmed whenever the ends began twisting into fiery wisps in ghost form.

He looks more and more like Dan every day but is determined not to let that fate come to pass.

The night of that fateful anniversary, then, is spent at Fenton Works, all of his loved ones around him, showing their support by sitting shoulder to shoulder as they watch Ghost Busters. Danny smiles around the room at his parents fighting over popcorn, Jazz mouthing along to the lines she'd memorized decades ago, and his two best friends, nudging him whenever he anxiously glances at the clock.

Less than an hour left in the day. It's already technically past the time when Dan would have showed up to destroy Amity Park and everything he holds dear, but Danny isn't taking any chances. He wants the second hand to pass midnight before he stops worrying.

But with each passing minute, he relaxes a little, rests a little easier. Everyone is safe. Everyone is here, within arm's reach and there is no reason for him to worry about a past that never even happened catching up to him.

After a few minutes, a noise catches his attention, something he doesn't remember from the movie soundtrack. He blinks and tilts his head to hear better… a mechanical beeping. A quick glance tells him that Tucker doesn't have an iphone out. It sounds like it could be coming from one of his parents' ubiquitous gadgets lying around the house, but to the best of his knowledge, they don't have anything that should be going off right now.

"Hey, do you guys here that?" he asks quietly.

Sam and Tucker frown but shake their heads. "Hear what?" Sam asks.

"Beeping," Danny replies, now craning his head to follow the sound better. It's sped up, and louder, more insistent now, and he should recognize that noise but he just can't place it.

His parents are looking up from the movie and their battle over the popcorn bowl now as well.

"Hey," Jack says. "Isn't that the ecto-filter alarm?"

Danny's face drains of color.

"Danny, you did change the filter this month, didn't you?" Maddie's quick to demand and Danny stares in horror. He hasn't even thought about his chores in weeks… he didn't-

He transforms right then and there, in full sigh of his parents and doesn't bother to worry about the ramifications as he speeds down to the portal.

The beeping is ongoing now, ratcheting up in frequency and Jazz is the first person to push to her feet, grabbing her dumbstruck parents by the arm. "Come on, we've got to get out of here…" she starts but there's no time, there's no-

It only takes Danny a moment to realize that he can't get to the filter in time to change or disarm anything. He hovers indecisive for a precious second, and then turns around, bursting out of the floor with a shield already half formed.

The basement explodes around him before he's able to close it off, breaking his concentration as the flames toss him into the middle of the street where he lands with a resounding crack.

.

Danny opens his eyes to find that he's buried in rubble, concrete and burnt rafters.

He knows before he's even moved that a leg is pinned and an arm broken. He tries not to dry heave at the sight of bone jutting out through skin. Because that's not supposed to-

He bites back a cry and tries to shake it off, coughs through the dust swirling around him and transforms so he can escape, so he can find his family, so he can save them, so he can get them out before-

Even as Phantom, he's burned and broken and sore and it takes him a minute to crawl out of his hole of burning wreckage to look around.

When he emerges to see the gaping hole where his house used to stand, and turns to see the street littered with the twisted metal of the Ops Center and the rain of broken bricks leaving chalky red streaks on the asphalt around him, and the five bodies that can't possibly be alive…

Tears blur his vision and he doesn't even realize that the broken noises he hears are coming from him. He tumbles over the rocks, not even caring about jostling his arm or hobbling along on a twisted foot.

He comes to rest beside his glassy eyed sister, mere feet away from Sam, her head smashed open on the concrete and limbs mangled by the stones that landed on top of her.

It can't be real, he thinks. It's not-

There has to be something he can do- some way to go back-

It's not…

They're not…

Then he catches sight of what he assumes is all that's left of his dad, scattered bits of orange fabric fluttering through the air from brick to brick.

There are sirens in the distance, coming closer, coming for them, but there's nothing to be done, there's nothing-

And Danny falls to the pavement, sobbing so hard that he can't hold himself up and he wishes more than anything in the world that he could have died alongside them, that he could be gone too.

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 **I missed out on the celebrations, but a few weeks ago was the 10th year anniversary of The Ultimate Enemy and thus the safe mark for Danny in this timeline.**

 **But. Then it was angst day. And nothing can be safe. So...**


End file.
